On Saturday, March 30, a group of non-governmental organizations who claim to protect human rights began tweeting that a group of settlers, irrespective of whether it was Shabbat, had come armed to local Bedouins and stolen their livestock. The story began to spread and even reached the White House.
On Saturday night, the livestock was found, but not with settlers. It turns out the pictures of armed settlers in their Shabbat finest the NGOs were spreading had nothing to do with the stolen livestock. The livestock were found in an illegally constructed dwelling near Uja al-Fooqa, and Bedouins were the thieves. When confronted by police, the Bedouins violently attacked the police.
False stories, exaggerated statistics, and fabricated pictures are all too common when it comes to NGO and media reports of “settler violence.” Of course, there are extremist and violent settlers, but they are a small and statistically insignificant group when compared to the larger settler community and the wider Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The recent hyperbolic reports of settler violence – not coincidently exponentially rising in volume and embellishment since the Palestinian attacks on October 7 – are the reason why Ronen Bergman and Mark Mazzetti’s recent report on settlers in The New York Times, “The Unpunished: How Extremists Took Over Israel,” is so insidious, and its untruths need to be exposed.
A hit job in mafia lore is when a mobster murders another mobster; a hit job in the media isn’t a murder but when someone slanders another person without justification.
It was no surprise that a story meant to demonize a segment of Israeli society would appear in the Times. Abraham Foxman, director emeritus of the Anti-Defamation League, posted on X: “The New York Times obsession to project Israel as the most evil , hateful, corrupt country in the world is almost incomprehensible. It is not ignorance, so it has to be biased, bordering on antisemitism. Sad because it is one of the great newspapers in America – but with a major flaw.”
Since October 7, some 147 stories empathetic to Israel have appeared in the Times, compared to more than four times as many (647) that were empathetic to Palestinians. The New York Times has a clear agenda to portray Israel as violent and problematic.
THE TIMES story on settlers aims to show that “after 50 years of failure to stop violence and terrorism against Palestinians by Jewish ultranationalists, lawlessness has become the law,” Foxman wrote.
The story is broken into three parts. “The first documents the unequal system of justice that grew around Jewish settlements in Gaza and the West Bank. The second shows how extremists targeted not only Palestinians but also Israeli officials trying to make peace. The third explores how this movement gained control of the state itself. Taken together, they tell the story of how a radical ideology moved from the fringes to the heart of Israeli political power,” he wrote.
As in almost all stories that have been published in the past year about settler violence, Bergman and Mazzetti’s story attempts to take a small number of violent incidents and portray them as major incidents that occur frequently enough to be considered epidemics of Israeli society.
Selective data
These inflated reports are the equivalent of scouring police reports for incidents of infrequent crimes, quoting one or two particularly nefarious incidents along with the total number of crimes without context of total crime and making it seem that these crimes are an overlooked plague destroying society from within. While all crime is abhorrent, when exaggerating a crime to make it seem like a crime wave, the true ills of society are overlooked.
Bergman and Mazzetti aren’t only guilty of exaggerating the frequency and threat of settler violence – their story gives the impression that the settler extremists and attacks are representative of an entire community. It is true that buried in their fifty-page story is a caveat that, “Among the settlers, there is a large majority who aren’t involved in violence or other illegal acts against Palestinians.”
But consider that the rest of their report tells this story of settlers as, “A sometimes criminal nationalistic movement that has been allowed to operate with impunity and gradually move from the fringes to the mainstream of Israeli society.” One sentence out of hundreds that tell the opposite story doesn’t give a nuanced or balanced impression to the reader. Their report is agenda driven and biased, as evidenced by nearly no print given to settlers to tell their story.
THIS STORY aims to take statistically infrequent incidents conducted by a tiny segment of a population and make them seem representative of the entire settler community. This is classic racism, where generalizations are made of an entire population based on the actions of a small group within it. What makes The New York Times story so treacherous is that Bergman and Mazzetti know the truth about the settler community but they purposely distorted the reality of the settler population – and know the impression they were leaving was distorted and false.
The story claims to be, “an account of how voices within the government that objected to the condoning of settler violence were silenced and discredited. And it is a blunt account, told for the first time by Israeli officials themselves, of how the occupation came to threaten the integrity of their country’s democracy.”
This seems to be a conspiracy of right-wing extremists to take over and destroy Israel. In truth, the left wing in Israel has lost popularity due to failed policies, and right-wing positions have become more and more popular in Israel in recent years. Israelis have come to realize that Palestinians have little interest in their own state, but real interest in destroying Israel’s.
As immoral as it is, when compared to Palestinian terrorism, settler violence is insignificant in its overall effect on Israel, Palestinians, and the conflict as a whole. Of course, Israel must stop violence by settlers, but when one recognizes that Palestinian terrorism has killed thousands, maimed tens of thousands, and is the most obvious impediment to peace, one has to wonder what motivated The New York Times, Ronen Bergman, and Mark Mazzetti to focus on a smaller issue when the larger issue of Palestinian terrorism deserves the world’s attention. I won’t speculate as to their motivations, but I can definitively say that they were not motivated by truth.
The writer is a certified interfaith hospice chaplain in Jerusalem and the mayor of Mitzpe Yeriho, Israel. She lives with her husband and six children.